In a scathing essay on the jargon of the movie business, David Mamet writes of the term 'character-driven' that 'I think it means that the project in question has a weak plot'. Nicole Holofcener's new movie, Lovely and Amazing, like her debut Walking and Talking five years ago, has been called 'character-driven'. This means there's a lot of incident but little structure in a film that picks up a group of unhappy, aimless characters, follows their uncertain progress for a few weeks, and then suddenly drops them.

In Lovely and Amazing, Brenda Blethyn plays Jane, a widow in her fifties with three daughters living in Los Angeles. Her elder daughters, now in their thirties, are Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) an unmarried actress with a stalled career, and the bitter Michelle (Catherine Keener), unhappily married with a small son and trying to make a living selling expensive handicraft that no shop wants to stock. Out of compassion and a need for company, Jane has adopted a third daughter, the aggressive, overweight 8-year-old Annie, whose parents are black crackheads incapable of raising her. Holofcener sets these characters walking around like wind-up dolls, bumping into things and people, and suddenly leaves them as they experience unresolved crises. Jane is suffering serious complications following liposuction. Little Annie is acting up and runs away from home. Elizabeth has lost out on a movie job and been temporarily disfigured by a stray dog biting her upper lip. Michelle has abandoned her art work, taken a job in a photo shop and been booked for statutory rape after having sex with a teenage lad she works with.

It's all sad, hopeless, well observed and admirably acted. The dialogue rings true and the central characters are surrounded by as unlovable a collection as you'd meet at a 'Re-elect George Bush' rally. The worst is Elizabeth's brittle, heartless agent, who gives her client an unwanted present with the words 'I'm re-gifting', and arranges an audition to see if the actress is sexy enough to appear opposite the film's star saying 'It's a chemistry read'.

Jia Zhang-ke's Platform is an ambitious, largely unsuccessful attempt to use a provincial Chinese musical comedy group to reflect social change of the 1980s, the way the infinitely superior Farewell My Concubine used the Peking Opera to examine historical currents and fashions from the 1920s to the 1970s. Set between 1979, when the musicians perform ridiculous agitprop Maoist songs, and 1989, when they break up after going through rock, disco and punk phases as the All Stars Rock'n'Break Dance Electronic Band, the film has some good and revealing moments. Two of the troupe, for instance, are arrested for the illicit (i.e. non-married) sex they all practice. A girl tells a friend during a casual chat that she's just seen the public execution of some dissidents, shot in the back of the head by police. 'How gross,' says the other girl. But the characters remain ill-defined as does the geography of their travels and the precise years in which events happen. Platform's a slow, elliptical picture, made more remote by the director's decision to shoot almost every scene in long-shot, using extended takes and eschewing camera movement.

The first movie by the Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar, Time of Favor, is a disappointing moral thriller that throws little new light on the present situation in an Israel where there's not a Palestinian to be seen. A charismatic rabbi (played by Asi Dayan, son of the great, one-eyed Moshe), spiritual leader of a West Bank settlement, fights to secure a military company made up entirely of the best students from his yeshiva with Menachem (Aki Avni), a regular soldier from the settlement, in command. At the same time he teaches his pupils to build a third temple on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. His best student, Pinchus (Edan Alterman), a brilliant fanatic, plots to blow up the holy mosque and realise the rabbi's command. When Mossad arrest the innocent Menachem, the Rabbi says he was only talking metaphorically about the Third Temple. The film is intriguing and well enough made, but the sub-plot involving Menachem and Pinchus both courting the rabbi's daughter is factitious.

Men in Black II, a painfully disappointing sequel to a funny and ingenious movie, reunites Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith to pursue more colourful aliens. There's about enough plot to fill a 25-minute episode of a TV series. In the most amusing part of the picture Jones is suffering from officially induced amnesia and working in a rural post office in New England. Part of the joke is that a man in black, formerly dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie is reduced to wearing a postman's shorts and long socks.